Three Against the Wilderness

by Eric Collier

  If in the course of time the limp became less pronounced, it never altogether disappeared. Lillian’s spine was affected by the fall, her right hipbone too. If in years to come both medical doctors and osteopaths were to examine her (as was the case shortly after we were married), it was now too late to repair the damage that had occurred such a long time ago. From the moment of the fall, the limp would be with Lillian to the end of her days.

  It was this slight deformity of the spine that upset all our plans for moving back to the headwaters of the creek in the spring of 1930, and delayed everything for another year. According to all our calculations, if I remained working at Riske Creek until April of 1930, and saved every cent that I could from my wages, we’d then have sufficient money to buy all that was needed at the start of the venture anyway. But six weeks after our marriage an event came about that was to make impelling demands on no small portion of the money I had saved. Lillian was pregnant.

  After digesting this breathtaking piece of news, I said soberly, “You’ll have to go away to a hospital and a good doctor.”

  “That,” she cut in quietly, “will cost too much money. After all, lots of women in this country have their babies in their own homes and—”

  “But you’re not going to,” I interrupted. And after unsuccessfully fumbling for the right words: “Don’t you see, with the shape your back is in, this might not be so easy for you as it is for some of the Indian women.”

  Shortly after, I packed Lillian off to Quesnel, a small village perched on the banks of the Fraser ninety miles north of Riske Creek, which not only boasted a doctor but a fairly modern hospital too. After examining her, the medical man’s advice was blunt. She must be in Quesnel, where he could look after her, at least a month before the baby was born. Owing to the defects in her spine and hipbone, it wouldn’t be an easy delivery. It was quite possible that he would have to take the child from her by caesarean operation.

  As things turned out, by the grace of God and skill of the doctor, on July 28, 1929, Veasy Eric Collier was brought into the world naturally. But the following fall I met the doctor in person at Riske Creek, where he had come to hunt ducks and geese. After casually asking about the health of Lillian and our child, he stared me straight in the face and reflected, “Young man, you’re fortunate. It wasn’t an easy birth by any means.” Then, completely serious, he warned, “I think you’d best settle for just the one.”

  It cost us close to one hundred fifty dollars cash money to bring Veasy into the world, and even if this did delay everything for another year, we were far, far richer for the delay.

  June 2, 1931. Eleven years ago to this very day, England became a memory. The sun, airborne now for all of four hours, stared cynically down from an almost cloudless sky. Swallows skimmed in and out of the high loft above the livery barn, building new nests or patching up last year’s. Down the lane, a small flock of ewes snoozed beneath the shade of a lone cottonwood tree, lambs bucking stiff-legged on and off their as yet unshorn backs. In a log corral by the pigpens, a milk cow licked the membrane from her newly arrived calf.

  The wagon stood in front of the store, stowed away within its high freight box the provisions, tools and other effects that we had been so long in gathering. Becher sat on the porch, stroking the ears of the cocker spaniel. “Look me up whenever you want a job,” he said affably.

  “There’ll be work for me a-plenty, no doubt, back where we’re heading,” I tossed back.

  He nodded. “But what about pay?”

  I didn’t know too much about that part of it myself.

  I hitched the horses to the doubletrees, tossed Veasy Eric into the wagon box and then helped Lillian up to the high seat. I climbed up alongside her and said “Giddup,” and flicked at the team with the whip. Bowing their necks to the collar the horses grudgingly tightened the traces. Slowly, and with a protesting creak, the wagon wheels turned. I followed the main Chilcotin road for a mile, then reined the horses away from the well-packed gravel, steering them due north toward the wilderness on the outline of a track almost hidden by grass and weeds. Lillian and I turned in the seat and looked down for the last time for many a month at the buildings of the trading post in the valley below. Then we shifted position again and faced the north.

  Chapter 3

  Open country, with its bunchgrass-clad slopes and its herds of white-faced range cattle, was behind us now. The everlasting forest and its litter of boulders, roots and blowdowns now held us in a grip that has remained unbroken from that day to this. Since leaving the open country and reining the horses through the timber, I’d had to jump impatiently down from the wagon seat a dozen times and heft the double-bitted axe and clear the right-of-way of some trees that had gone down before April’s lusty winds. Yet blowdown or boulder, we could thank our lucky stars that there was such track to follow. Indians had originally blazed it out through the timber to get their horses and wagons back into the deep heart of the hunting country ahead. After the Indians, white men had followed this track in the forest, seeking wild hay meadows where winter feed for the cattle could be obtained in quantity for the cost of its cutting and stacking. Yet despite the hay that was annually cut upon these meadows, they knew no permanent inhabitants. A crew of men went out from the home ranches in late July to cut and stack the hay. Later on, usually in December, herds of cattle were driven north from the fall ranges to winter on it. From December until late March the small log cabins built on the meadows were tenanted by a couple of cowboys, usually bachelors, who fed and tended the cattle. But save for a month or six weeks in summer and three months in winter, the meadows got along nicely without the benefit of human presence at all.

  We had no watch to tell us the hour of the day. Somewhere in the bowels of the wagon box a three-dollar-and-fifty-cent alarm clock was ticking off the seconds, if the jerk and the bounce of the wagon wheels had not yet ruptured its innards. The sun, now stooping down to the west, was our only visible timepiece, and for that matter the only one that counted. It had been rising in the east, bedding in the west, for quite some time before alarm clocks appeared on the scene.

  Sweat dripped from the bellies of the team. In a sense, the horses themselves were a timepiece, and one that had to be heeded. They could pull the loaded wagon just so many miles in a day, but not an ell farther. You couldn’t wind up horseflesh as you could the gears of a clock.

  I half turned in the seat and glanced back at Veasy. He was cuddled up in a sort of nest that we had arranged for him among the bedding. His tiny hands were entwined in the rope binding the load down, and he lay on his back, face to the sun. His brow was moist with sweat, and his eyes were closed, and I wondered, “How does he manage to sleep through all this jostling and bouncing?”

  Then I looked at Lillian. The whipstock was in her left hand, its lash trailing alongside the wagon wheels. “You’re getting tired, aren’t you,” I said.

  “A little,” she acknowledged. Then with a mock grimace: “If only there weren’t so many rocks!”

  Rocks and roots! If the wagon wheels weren’t climbing over the one, they were dropping off the other. It had been like that for the last few miles, and the lines were looped around my waist, leaving my hands free to grip the lurching wagon seat.

  “We could keep on travelling north for a hundred miles without cutting the fresh tracks of another living soul,” I remarked to Lillian.

  But I don’t think she heard me. For the last few minutes she had been leaning over the seat, staring down at the left front wheel.

  “I declare it’s coming apart,” she now suddenly said. “One of the felloes is loose.”

  I hauled in on the lines. It wasn’t much of a wagon anyway. I’d bought it from an Indian for fifteen dollars cash and one prime coyote pelt. At the time, I knew that its tires should be reset, and that it needed a new felloe here and there, but didn’t feel like parting with the price a blacksmith would charge to make the necessary repairs.

  Lillian’s roving eye
had spotted the damage in the nick of time. One more boulder, a couple more roots, and the wheel would have likely collapsed, and its tire gone rolling merrily off into the woods until halted by impact with a tree.

  “Haywire,” I jerked out. “Where did we stow that haywire?”

  Here in these Chilcotin forests one could, if he owned any sort of a rifle and knew how to use it, get along nicely for day after day with no other food than that obtained with the gun. If one couldn’t find a deer, he could almost always locate a porcupine. Or trail a band of wild horses and shoot a suckling colt whose pink tender flesh was as tasty as any veal. If dishes and cooking utensils were handy things to have along, they weren’t really necessary. A hunk of deer ribs roasted on a spit before the open fire tasted perhaps a wee bit better than it would have had it just come from an oven. But haywire and pliers one must have somewhere in his kit if he wished to survive very long. With just a little haywire you could reset a fractured wagon reach, mend a shattered axe handle, brace an ailing pack saddle, make yourself a fish hook. Or if too much hard luck lay athwart the trail and misfortune had no end, you could as a last resort snip off a few feet of good pliable haywire, fix it with a noose and then go hang yourself from the sturdy limb of some nearby tree.

  “Haywire,” I repeated. “Where did we stow that haywire?”

  “It’s here, under the seat.” Lillian handed me the wire.

  Then: “Pliers,” I sang out. “Now where did we put those pliers?”

  “They’re in your pocket, of course,” Lillian laughed.

  So I took the haywire and for the next ten minutes worked steadily and carefully on the wagon wheel. When at last satisfied that I’d done all that wire could do, I squinted toward the sun and said, “There’s a lake up ahead a couple of miles and we’ll camp there overnight. We can take the wheel off the hub there and give it an all-night soaking. That’ll swell the wood and tighten it against the tire, and the wheel will be just like new until it dries out again.”

  The lake was over a mile long. At its north end where visible water halted and grassy marsh took over, a long sandy peninsula thrust out above the water. Pointing to the ridge with the whip, I told Lillian, “We’ll make camp out on that point where there’ll be nothing to break the wind. The mosquitoes will start coming out of the swamp in their millions as soon as the sun goes down, but the wind will keep them away from camp if we pitch our tent on the peninsula. If the wind drops we’ll have to build a smudge, and keep the smoke rolling all night, or we won’t be getting much sleep.”

  May had been cold and backward, and the pea vines and vetches of the timbered country were tardy in making growth. We had planned to start work on our cabin in mid-May so as to have it at least partially habitable by early June, when the stagnant waters of pond and creek would be hatching mosquitoes in their millions. However, a cold and unseasonable spring had delayed us and kept us cooling our heels at Riske Creek, looking for a warm-up in the weather that would ensure us plenty of green feed back in the woods for our horses.

  As May gave way to June, the mood of the weather changed too. The nip of frost left the night, and the air became sticky and sultry. The mossy floor of the forest was still moist with winter’s spent snows, and pea vines and vetches, wild columbines, fireweed and swamp lilies now clawed energetically up through the warming topsoil toward a sun that had been denied them so long.

  Plants were not the only things to come up from the moss. This was the hour of the mosquito and deer fly, and for the next two months anyway, whenever human or other foot left an imprint in the wilderness, legions of bloodthirsty insects would question its right to be there. Yet somehow we must learn to get along with them if we were to become a part of that wilderness ourselves.

  Out on the peninsula, the breeze coming in off the lake would push the mosquitoes back whenever they ventured away from the marsh. So on reaching the end of the lake, I pulled the harness from the horses, hobbled them and turned them loose to graze. Then I took the tent from the wagon, pitched it by the side of the wagon and, while Lillian cooked supper, jacked the wagon up, removed the ailing wheel and rolled it out in the lake, where it settled from sight.

  The wagon bore all our worldly possessions, and though heavily overloaded, the lot might have fetched only some two or three hundred dollars if one had to turn them in for cash. There were food, blankets and tents, pots and pans, axes and adzes, hammers and horseshoes, saws and nails, guns and traps, cookstove and heater; these and a score of other assorted items that had been gathered together over a period of two years completely filled the wagon box. Most of the tools were secondhand, but there on the headwaters of Meldrum Creek, twenty-five miles north of the nearest store, over seventy from the nearest railroad, they had a value that could hardly be computed in terms of dollars and cents. The .303 rifle in its buckskin scabbard was our passport to a certain meat supply when I was able to find time to hunt. The axes and adzes, nails and saws were essential tools when we began building the home.

  Where we were headed there would be no neighbours to run to for loan of things—at least, not unless we wanted to undertake a fifty-mile round trip by saddle horse or wagon. And there was little money to replace any of the precious tools should they be broken or lost. Their purchase in the first place had about sapped us of cash. In fact, the pocketbook I had entrusted to Lillian for safekeeping now contained but thirty dollars and some odd cents, and neither of us quite knew how long that skimpy sum would have to last before more cash came our way.

  We discussed this matter of finance as the wagon wheels jolted over the rocks and roots, each jolt taking us a little farther from Riske Creek, a little closer to journey’s end.

  “Discounting sickness or something like that,” I remarked to Lillian, “that money should take care of us until fall, for there’ll not be much use for money back where we’re going. By the first of November we’ll have a cabin and barn built, and hay of sorts stacked as winter feed for the horses. I guess the traps should take care of us then.”

  Lillian shifted position on the seat. She braced her left foot against the end-gate of the box. “My hip is beginning to ache a bit,” she said. Then after a moment of thought: “I’m sure we’ll get by, Eric.” After a bit she went on, “It’s likely to be quite some time before there’s anything but coyotes to trap.”

  “Three or four years, maybe.”

  For if the activities of yesterday’s fur trade had filched the very last beaver from the watershed—and the extermination of the beavers resulted in similar extinction of so many other fur-bearers—the coyotes had managed to survive. Trap and snare, rifle and hound dog—all had been employed by both white man and Indian in the effort to rid the coyote of his gray, silky coat. That is, since the fur trade found profitable use for his fur. There was a day when finer furs were so plentiful that the coyotes were only worth two dollars’ bounty money that the government paid on their scalps. But today a prime silky coyote could be bartered at any trading post for eight or ten dollars’ worth of groceries or other goods. Despite the fact that the hand of every trapper and settler in the country was raised against them, the coyotes somehow managed to hold their own.

  Some forty or fifty assorted traps were in the wagon box, together with a hundred rounds of ammunition for the rifle. By tailing October the coyotes would lose their summer shagginess and their pelts would become prime. With November’s first snowfall I could set and bait the traps, but not until then had we any hope of replenishing the lean contents of the pocketbook.

  The water buckets filled, and wood cut and stacked alongside the fire, I sprawled on the ground, head on the wagon tongue, and watched Lillian make bannock (baking powder bread) and place it in pans before the fire. From somewhere on the lake a loon’s dismal cry sang a song of loneliness. Perhaps according to some reckoning it might have been lonely out there on the point, a good many miles from anywhere and getting farther away all the time. But not according to mine. Resting there, listening to the
jangle of the horse bells, and watching Lillian get the meal ready, I was contented, at peace with myself. Tomorrow we’d come to the headwaters of the creek, cross it and continue downstream a bit. By late afternoon we’d be home, and if for a week or two that home was a ten-by-twelve-foot tent stretched in the shade of the trees, it would be home just the same. And I’d have Lillian and Veasy, and a hundred and fifty thousand acres of wilderness, and as long as the three of us were together to share that wilderness, loneliness would never upset us. I was quite sure of that.

  The sun was astir when I kindled a fire in the morning. A strong wind was still blowing in off the lake, keeping the mosquitoes out of camp. I waded out into the water and fished out the wheel. The soaking had swelled the felloe and it was again snug and tight against the spoke and tire of the wheel.

  By the time I had wrangled the horses and harnessed the team, Lillian sang out, “Breakfast.” Now the wind was dying, allowing the mosquitoes to move in on us from the marsh. And move in they did, in vicious humming clouds, forcing us to eat and drink with one hand as we fought them away with the other. For both us and the horses, there were only two possible avenues of escape: a huge smudge that would cover the peninsula with smoke, or a quick getaway from the lake. We chose the latter.

  By ten o’clock we reached the headwaters of the creek, yet despite the fact that only some six or seven weeks ago there had still been snow in the forest, now only a thin trickle of water moved along the channel, barely enough to wet the tires of the wagon wheels as they bumped to the other side. “The whole creek will be dry in another couple of weeks unless it rains,” I predicted to Lillian.